[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Inferno (1980)

The story follows a young man's (Leigh McCloskey) investigation of his sister's disappearance from her New York apartment, an apartment that was allegedly home to an ancient witch, one of the three mothers, Mater Tenebrarum (the other two being Mater Lachrymarum and Mater Suspiriorum ).

Inferno has everything you'd want in a Dario Argento film. There's the trademark gore, shot as stylishly as ever, like watching a painting created out of blood, together with a terrific score from rock legend Keith Emerson and there's the colours.

Prior film Suspiria (1977) is rightly lauded for it's use of colour. Reds that prove so vibrant that they are integral to the film's aura, yet Inferno is very much the same with a powerful use of bright pinks and blues, often in the same shot and are every bit as stylish as anything Suspiria offers up, even more so perhaps as i think the colour palettes work even better here so much so that even dark night time scenes have a day-glo vibrancy to them. It's not so much a stylish Gothic horror as a stylish Art Deco horror and it's utterly mesmeric.

As a whole the film is a hypnotic nightmarish descent into hell, perfectly encapsulated by the opening scenes as Irene Miracle's Rose takes a swim in a water filled basement trying to reach her keys and coming across a putrefying corpse in the submerged cellar. It's unnerving and highly claustrophobic and sets the scene of the terrors to come.